Jonathan Hill - Design Studio Vol. 3: Designs on History: The Architect as Physical Historian

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Elizabeth Dow and Jonathan Hill

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231288-1

Tom Noonan, John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science, 2010. River panorama.

As dialogical tutors, our aim is to create a coherent position that is also questioning and incomplete, and thus a stimulus to each persons creative development, facilitating a generous design community of individuals. We encourage each student to develop their own creative myth, an evolving collection of ideas, values and techniques that spurs design, and to foster friendships and associations that will sustain future careers.

At the start of the academic year, we galvanise Unit 12 students at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, to trust intuition as a form of intelligence based on knowledge and experience, identifying a catalyst to the imagination that can then develop in conjunction with critical reflection. A creative dialogue should also exist between design intention and working medium. Often, the most fruitful innovations develop between distinct but related media, such as analogue and digital drawing, encouraging the designer to conceptualise their place within this process. Design is a form of critical and creative play, tricking and surprising us to understand and question presumptions and prejudices.

Our concern is the relevance of the past recent or distant to the present and future, speculating on the question: how and why might this happen now? As well as history, we are interested in personal history. When everybody else is looking at one time and place, its always good to look elsewhere as a discovery may be yours alone, and thus more surprising for everyone. Exceptional architects are exceptional storytellers. Such tales have special significance when they resonate back-and-forth between private inspiration and public narrative.

Architecture is about bricks and mortar and concrete does follow formwork, but these seemingly quite pragmatic statements can and often do mask the complex set of research questions that each student and architect must ask themselves to determine the when, why, how, from what and for whom a building might be constructed. Whilst we see speculation and an ability to conflate fact and fiction as a vital part of our approach to the study of architecture, this does not mean that Unit 12 students do not have equal determination and genuine passion to understand how architecture is built, from inception to completion, appreciating the joy of the small detail that informs the big picture. To suggest that architectural practice is the real world, and education is somehow less real, misses the point. It fails to recognise that building the skills of speculation, the ability to ask what if?, and the rigour of constructing a research-based position, allow each student, and subsequently each architect, to be much more able to hold their ground and convince others.